Scott Davis

Success is rare and difficult to achieve, so it’s natural to cling to our successes for too long, such that we end up stale or irrelevant. A few changes in mindset can empower us to move intentionally from one success to another, without waiting for obsolescence of our former glory.

Key points:

• Every success has a shelf life.
• The way to better often goes through worse.

Nature used endless change to create human beings. So, why do we have such a bad attitude about change? Seeing change differently opens up our brains so that we can see and exploit more opportunities for growth.

Key Points:

• Change plus adaptation equals growth.
• The core of all growth strategy is two questions. What is going on? And, what might we do about it?

No plan survives contact with the opposition. Usually the opposition looks like competitors, but sometimes it looks like…life, nature, chaos, the unpredictable. We must reconcile two realities: without a plan we cannot succeed, and no plan will survive unscathed its own implementation.

Key Points:

• How to navigate via rigid values and flexible plans.

Mature organizations are excellent at standardization, forecasting, command-and-control, and efficiency. But the same cultural values and habits that make an organization great at wringing the last drop of value from an old idea, also make collaborating, innovating, exploring, and finding the next big thing…REALLY hard.

Key Points:

• Most of us mis-understand collaboration because we’ve never actually collaborated.
• “Get it right the first time” is a recipe for being un-innovative.

Many of the recent political, tribal discussions of diversity have distracted us from the STRATEGIC value of human differentiation – in skill, in experience, in awareness, in habit, in aspiration, in imagination. We need to get back to basics in how we approach diversity, to see that it is the source of strategic advantage by making us better at the two critical strategic capabilities of every firm: sensing and imagining.

Key Points:

• Differentiation is our species’ superpower.
• Most ideas are bad, but more ideas are still better.